Serving Static Files in Production with whitenoise in Django

When building a Django application, it’s important to serve static files such as CSS, JavaScript, and images in a production environment. This ensures that your website or web application looks and functions as intended for your users.

One way to serve static files in production with Django is by using whitenoise. Whitenoise is a simple and efficient way to serve static files directly from your Django application without the need for a separate web server or CDN.

Setting up whitenoise

To use whitenoise in your Django application, start by installing the whitenoise package using pip:

pip install whitenoise

Next, add ‘whitenoise.middleware.WhiteNoiseMiddleware’ to the MIDDLEWARE setting in your Django settings file:

MIDDLEWARE = [
  # ...
  'whitenoise.middleware.WhiteNoiseMiddleware',
  # ...
]

Finally, set the STATICFILES_STORAGE setting to ‘whitenoise.storage.CompressedStaticFilesStorage’:

STATICFILES_STORAGE = 'whitenoise.storage.CompressedStaticFilesStorage'

Collecting static files

Once whitenoise is set up, you can collect all of your static files into a single directory using the collectstatic management command:

python manage.py collectstatic

This command will collect all of the static files from your Django project and any installed apps and place them in the directory specified by the STATIC_ROOT setting.

Configuring your web server

Now that your static files are being served by whitenoise, you can configure your web server to serve the static files directly from the STATIC_ROOT directory. If you’re using a service like Heroku or AWS Elastic Beanstalk, you can simply enable whitenoise and your static files will be served automatically.

Serving static files in a production environment is an important step in ensuring that your website or web application looks and functions as intended for your users. With whitenoise, serving static files in Django is simple and efficient, allowing you to focus on building a great user experience.